1. Field of the Invention
One or more embodiments of the present invention relate to an optical disk device, and more particularly, to a slot-in type optical disk device which can be operated manually to load/unload an optical disk.
2. Description of the Related Art
Various information storage media such as optical disks that are inexpensive and have large information storage capacity are nowadays widely used. Optical disks are generally classified into compact disks (CD) and digital versatile disks (DVD) according to the information storage capacity. Examples of such optical disks are 650 MB CD-R, CD-RW, 4.7 GB DVD-R, DVD+R, DVD-RW, DVD+RW, and the like. In addition, HD-DVD and blue ray disk having recording capacity of 200 GB or greater have been developed.
Conventional optical disk devices, having a cassette or tray for accommodating an optical disk, have been used for mobile/portable electronic devices such as laptops or camcorders. However, there are several problems with such conventional devices. That is, conventional optical disk devices are generally larger in size and thus are difficult to carry. In addition, insertion or ejection of an optical disk in such an environment is inconvenient. Thus, a slot-in type optical disk device having a slim slot, with a width corresponding to that of an optical disk, through which an optical disk can be easily inserted or ejected, is typically more preferable than the conventional optical disk device.
In this case, however, it has been found desirable that the optical disk be manually ejected when the optical disk device has a defect, the operation system of the laptop using the optical disk device malfunctions, or the battery of the laptop completely runs out. Thus, to achieve this herein identified need, a slot-in type optical disk device particularly needs a structure to manually eject an optical disk. However, up to now, the structure to eject an optical disk manually has not been provided for such a slot-in type optical disk device.